He had hit rock bottom, he told the judge. He was making amends to his wife, Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin, and their 5-year-old son, Jordan. Public approbation no longer mattered to him, nor did his now-ruined political career nor his public reputation. He was once mentally diseased, but since his arrest in May by the FBI, no more.

“I focus on how I live my new, smaller, healthier life one day at a time,” Weiner said. “I was a very sick man for a very long time. I have a disease but no excuse.”

How long we, the beleaguered public, have been hearing this, and how delusional of Weiner to think a judge, too, would believe him.

His years-long offend-repent-re-offend-really-repent cycle has only advanced over the years, the narrative becoming ever more sordid, his wife complicit in foisting him upon us and our politics.

We’ve been living with this pathetic soap opera for eight years now, since Weiner was forced to resign from Congress after news broke he’d been sexting women around the country, and had sent a bulging crotch shot to a 21-year-old college student.

“I really do feel like a very, very different person,” Weiner said, offering pre-packaged quotes about his political aspirations.

“I’m very happy in my present life. The only next dramatic steps I’m planning on taking are Jordan’s first.”

Abedin, too, avoided politics and focused on their newfound idyllic domesticity. “It took a lot of work to get to where we are today, but I want people to know we’re a normal family,” she said. “Anthony has spent every day since [the scandal] trying to be the best dad and husband he can be.”

The magazine noted, unironically, that Weiner did all the dirty laundry.

“I’m proud to be married to him,” Abedin said.

Less than one year later, in April 2013, the couple sat for an extensive and sympathetic interview with the New York Times Magazine, their political selves slightly more transparent. They weren’t using their baby son as a political shield, they said; they allowed him to be photographed merely to minimize paparazzi presence outside their apartment building. They spun Weiner’s actions as a sex scandal without the sex. They didn’t know if Hillary Clinton was planning a presidential run in 2016, or if Weiner was planning a mayoral run that year. No, they just wanted societal re-entry — they weren’t floating trial balloons or softening up suspicious voters.

“I don’t have this burning, overriding desire to go out and run for office,” Weiner said.

In the Times piece, Weiner noted that he’d spent the past two years forensically investigating his aberrant behavior. “Part of the challenge of getting to the bottom of it for me,” he said, “is that I viewed it as so frivolous that it didn’t spark a lot of, like, ‘OK, I started doing it on this day,’ or ‘OK, now I’m crossing a Rubicon’ . . . I think a lot of it came down to: I was in a world and a profession that had me wanting people’s approval.”

His therapist, he added, assured him he was not a sex addict. If only!

“She didn’t tell me: ‘You have a sex addiction! You were abused as a child!’ None of that stuff, which, in a lot of ways, I’d kind of prefer.”

Weiner and Abedin’s sophisticated PR strategy worked for a time: In June 2013, Weiner was leading in the mayoral polls. He told New York magazine that month he’d become newly successful because he’d “stopped lying.” In the same piece, he said he couldn’t write a memoir because publishers wanted him to have “some plotline, like my rise, my fall, how I bottom out, feel all this remorse, have an epiphany, and then come back.”

The redemption arc he and Abedin had been shilling for two years now, he admitted, wasn’t even true. “I’m supposed to be sorry, sorry in this way you’re supposed to be sorry . . . but I don’t know if it’s hitting me like that.”

Yet Weiner was so confident, he allowed a documentary crew to follow him.

“He said he wanted to be viewed as the full person he was,” co-director Elyse Steinberg told GQ in 2016, “and not as a punchline.”

Of course, Anthony Weiner was unable to help himself, and Steinberg’s crew was there when the world met Carlos Danger, Weiner’s new online sexting alter-ego, who’d been sexting at least 10 women, including a 22-year-old named Sydney Leathers.

Here’s one sanitized exchange:

Danger: May I tell you what i pondered yesternight?

Leathers: That would please me so very much.

Danger: Still caressing your flowing locks, I see your cherished bosom heaving as you move to and fro. I reveal my eager manhood. But — what would you have me do?

Leathers: Ravage me.

Even here, Weiner and Abedin refused to relinquish their quest for power, and Abedin — long portrayed as a put-upon, passive victim — spoke in Weiner’s defense at a hastily assembled news conference. “We discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor,” she said, admitting that she was complicit in the lies to the press and the electorate.

She also displayed a similar self-absorption: “I love him, I have forgiven him, and as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward.” In other words: If Huma was OK with him, New York voters should be too.

After refusing to drop out of the race — and continuing to shoot the documentary — Weiner lost, garnering less than 5 percent of the vote. He had a note-perfect concession event on election night, running through a McDonald’s to escape Leathers, heels off in hot pursuit. He capped off the evening by flipping off a reporter.

This, apparently, was too far even for Abedin — whose boss was running for president, the election three months away.
Hours later, Abedin announced that “after long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband.”

It was cynical, political timing, all too late: Then-FBI Director James Comey would announce a re-investigation into Clinton’s emails, some of which Abedin forwarded to Weiner’s laptop. It’s among the events Clinton claims cost her the election — though as recently as last week, she refused to say anything about Weiner and Abedin’s liabilities. Really, how difficult is it to pillory a sex offender?

The optics of Abedin’s public separation were soon belied by her decision to remain living with Weiner and her own written plea to the court to spare her husband jail time — for the sake of their child, of course.

He also asked her to strip and touch herself in Skype sessions, to dress up like a schoolgirl and join in his “rape fantasies.” He also, she said, asked her to lie for him.

“After I told my teacher about the relationship, [Weiner] wanted me to email my dad and my teacher and tell them that what I said was false,” the girl told the Daily Mail. “That the conversations were appropriate and never inappropriate, and he was very helpful.”

This is the real Anthony Weiner: someone who knows what he’s doing is wrong but doesn’t care, someone who lies and takes steps to hide such repeated actions, someone who ostensibly takes responsibility yet then blames others: the media, the other women, and, in a recent memo to the court, the 15-year-old girl, who he said manipulated him, a 53-year-old man, for fame — no matter how ignominious.

Anthony Weiner is a criminal and a sex offender, not a victim, but it’s doubtless even 21 months in prison will change him. His years-long sexual compulsions have led to his conviction as a sex offender, and at over 50 years old, he’s unlikely to ever change.

As he wrote to the judge right before sentencing: “I’m different now.”